Raindrop: Mozilla Labs Presents Open Messaging Prototype

The Thunderbird team at Mozilla has initiated a new project, Raindrop, for open messaging and are presenting a first prototype.

Inbox design for the Raindrop client.

The Raindrop messaging client gets its feeds from various sources: emails, blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. That's the plan at least. Users should be provided multiple filtering methods to separate the wheat from the chaff. According to the Raindrop announcement, the client "intelligently pulls out the important parts" of conversations, meaning that messages coming from a known Flicker buddy take priority over the usual webmail from service providers.

The Thunderbird conceptualizes Raindrop as a mini-webserver that fetches conversations from the aforementioned sources. From this collection Raindrop determines its choices and provides the connection to the services via a web browser. Aside from Firefox, Safari and Chrome are the browser choices.

Raindrop is an open source project under the Mozilla Public License. The project team encourages collaboration in design, development and testing. The source code for the prototype is currently available for download. The Raindrop roadmap clarifies the next development phases.

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